Flávio Bolsonaro, the firstborn made in the image and likeness of his father

São PauloThe family plan of former president Jair Bolsonaro, imprisoned for an attempted coup d'état, was for his entire clan to live parasitically off politics. His firstborn, Flávio, 45 years old and until now a senator, was the one who paved the way for his other three brothers. He, however, is the one who has gone furthest by running for the presidency of Brazil.

Ideologically, Flávio Bolsonaro repeats his father's extremist and coup-mongering playbook, which includes the glorification of the 1964 coup d'état and the worst torturers of the two decades of military dictatorship. He also defends the paramilitaries in Rio de Janeiro, the feared milicianos, to whom the Bolsonaro family has given voice and political cover, and who were their first electoral base in the western zone of the Carioca capital.

Pushed by his father, who was a federal deputy, Flávio began a public career in 2002, at the age of 21, when he was elected regional deputy in Rio de Janeiro, where he ended up serving four terms. During these sixteen years, the defense of the Rio police—one of the most lethal in the world—, tributes to paramilitaries, and public security issues were his electoral banner. He was accused of practicing rachadinhas, that is, of embezzling public funds to pay his cabinet's team of advisors (a case archived when his father was in the presidency). Among the advisors were relatives of the paramilitary and hitman Adriano da Nóbrega, killed by the police under strange circumstances while Jair Bolsonaro was in power, and who was allegedly linked to the execution of councilwoman Marielle Franco in March 2018, who became a national anti-fascist symbol and a symbol of the defense of democracy.

In 2016 Flávio Bolsonaro was a candidate for the mayoralty of Rio, but he finished in fourth place, with only 424,307 votes, 14% of the total. So, two years later, taking advantage of the first extremist wave that brought his father to the presidency, he made the leap to Brasília as the most voted senator of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Shadow advisor

During the four years of Bolsonaro the father at the Palácio do Planalto, he served as a shadow advisor, a sort of minister without portfolio with long tentacles and great power of influence. He participated in some council of ministers meetings and managed the articulation with the legislative power and the business world, fully aligned with the far right.

A law graduate —he is the only son of Jair Bolsonaro with a university degree—, he has combined political life with the practice of law at a firm he owns, where he has defended police officers, such as the one accused of killing a five-year-old girl in a favela with a rifle shot to the chest. The case has regained prominence in recent days.

Accused of embezzlement of public funds, Bolsonaro's firstborn has always emerged unscathed judicially. Now he is implicated in the macro corruption case of Banco Master, already liquidated by the Central Bank. There are recordings of him asking for 24 million dollars to finance a biopic about his father, although the Federal Police considers that the funds had a hidden destination.

During the election campaign, Flávio's business ties with his friend, the lawyer Willer Tomaz, have come to light; he is under investigation for having participated in a Social Security corruption case and for an alleged money laundering crime linked to online betting, through which he reportedly moved some 870 million euros in 2025.

Despite this gloomy outlook, his father, already convicted and imprisoned, chose him as a candidate for the presidential elections with the final objective, not of winning, but that the family clan would maintain the monopoly of the far right.